Guardians of the body politic: Political science and human liberty in the thought of Bertrand de Jouvenel

The wisdom and grace of the French political philosopher Bertrand Jouvenel (1903–1987) are on full display in his three masterworks of political reflection, On Power (1945), Sovereignty (1957), and The Pure Theory of Politics (1963). Together, these works articulate a political science that effectively responds to what he called the modern “rationalist crisis.” According to Jouvenel, modern political thought has freed Power—by which he meant political Authority—from the institutional and moral hedges that have traditionally limited, harnessed and moralized its practice. These three books, taken together, outline a political science that can effectively re-limit, re-harness, and re-moralize Power. After exploring Jouvenel\u27s treatment of political science and human liberty in his work as a whole, I present a critical commentary on The Pure Theory of Politics, the final installment of the “trilogy.” My dissertation focuses on Pure Theory precisely because this work offers the phenomenological “grammar” that undergirds Jouvenel\u27s earlier works on political authority and ethics. Every prescriptive sentence of Power and Sovereignty builds upon the “elemental” grammar, or “pure theory” of man and politics, that is only fully articulated in the third volume. It is the thesis of the dissertation that Pure Theory is the key to unlocking and defending the depths of Sovereignty\u27s dynamic notion of the common good, and for mitigating the tragedy that surrounds Power\u27s presentation of the inexorable rise of the centralized state in modern times. Pure Theory articulates the elementary building block of politics: the capacity of “man to move man.” This insight is conducive to many fruitful developments, which I explore in the dissertation. The dissertation examines Jouvenel\u27s rich analysis of political “behavior” and establishes how any effort to moralize or humanize politics depends upon an understanding of political phenomena in their raw state. By doing so, Jouvenel\u27s thought provides the means for bridging the chasm between ancient and modern political philosophy and empirical and normative political science